Communication, whether email, instant message, or phone, forms the basis that individuals, team leaders, and managers use to coordinate projects and track progress of their projects. Moving from the communication to generating progress reports is a manual process. While project management packages such as Microsoft Office exist, they are not sufficiently integrated into the communication infrastructure. Thus, the data required by such programs needs to be entered manually based on the communication that occurs between the project participants. Further, there is no ability to verify that the task is entered correctly.
It is important in the workplace to be able to track both individual and team progress. Tracking and reporting deliverables and tasks decided on via communication among individuals is critical to teams and individuals who need to summarize and present their work periodically to others, including 1) team leaders and project leaders who need to understand and be able to act and react to changes in project status, and 2) project managers who need to decide where to allocate resources. Existing in the marketplace today are 1) simple calendar programs that provide individuals with the ability to add action items such as calendar entries and to generate reminders for action items and 2) Programs like Microsoft Project, which can provide project managers with the status of a project. Neither of these existing programs, nor other such programs, are well integrated into common forms of communication in the workplace.
Today, many methods of communication exist in the workplace. These methods include regular mail, telephone calls, and electronic communications which can take the form of electronic mail messages and instant messages. However, the integration of these communication methods into the ability to aid in task tracking is minimal. Some capabilities, such as automatic calendar updates upon invitation acceptance, exist in programs such as Lotus Notes, but for the most part, tracking of progress on individual, team, and project tasks, whether human or computer-generated or accomplished, is done outside the scope of the communication itself.
Many of the functions described here and in the examples below occur in conventional systems in ad hoc and manual ways. There is a desire to coordinate these functions with the use of an automatic agent that understands tagged communications to significantly facilitate the effectiveness of individuals, team leaders, and managers and, thus, increase overall project performance.